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Friday, November 18, 2011

Genealogy is Unfair

I appreciate my ancestors. I really do. But the path to document their lives has been no easy task. I realize this more and more as I research the ancestors of others.

My own family lines are either from the South, other countries, or both. The places they came from don't have county histories or other publications about the area. My ancestors aren't in the books.

This situation has been made abundantly clear as I take on more and more client work. One person's ancestors are all over 1600's Connecticut. I found so many books mentioning this family line. Another client has a Salem witch in the tree. No shortage of information there.

Recently, I worked on my husband's family tree. He doesn't care much, so I do it for fun, curiosity, the chance to dispel myths, and in case my son catches on some day. I spent one evening looking at his Pierson line. You'd think that semi-common name would post some challenges, but it was really quite easy to gather information on his direct line. I kept going further and further back until I hit a prominent ancestor and all the wonderful records that come with him.

Meanwhile, in my own tree I'm wrestling with names like Joszt and Czwetelics in an area of Europe that changed country borders whenever the wind blew. JOSZT and CZWETELICS? Are you kidding me? Those surnames look like my cat walked across the keyboard.

Fine. I accept my fate. There is little to no information on my ancestors. It is my job to produce that information and make it available for future generations. I am the chosen one in the family, blah blah blah...

Welcome to the club. I'm the president. You can be vice-president or sergeant-at-arms, take your pick. I'm sure I'm the only genealogy blogger whose ancestors didn't write letters or keep diaries. Lord knows they didn't make it into a book.

Wendy - if you are president and Amy is VP can I at least be a flunky? I think my ancestors made it their personal goal in life to NEVER be mentioned in anything - county histories, newspapers etc. I have a friend who is only very marginally interesting in genealogy and I can find boatloads of stuff - for her!

Between my Poles and my husband's Ukrainians I'm exhausted, and of course spellings change depending on the direction of the wind. Some days I feel like I'm on Wheel of Fortune. I'd like to buy a vowel...

I wonder if that's why I stick to my mom's family more than my dad's family. My mom's family is from Michigan and Canada, which have plenty of records, particularly online records, going back to the 1830s.

This is the case in our family. I was born in Essex County, Massachusetts which has wonderful archives, town histories, and a plethora of resources. My family lived there for 12 generations or more. However, my husband is a first generation American. To work on his family tree we have to physically go to Spain and visit the village churches. There are few town histories, and fewer other resources. However, familysearch.org has recently provided us with many, many scanned images from some of these church records. We even found some scanned records on the Spanish National Archives website that we didn't find in an actual trip to the same archive in Madrid. Now I no longer have to wait for a return trip to Spain to look up many records. This was impossible 25 years ago. Who knows what the future will bring.

This sounds like my KERR family except they arrived from Ireland on alien space ships. On the other hand, the 'non-genealogist' hubby has an abundance of genealogy glory awaiting him at every turn in North eastern USA. It ain't fair. Can I join the club too?

I volunteer to be treasurer. And if I see one more Ag-Lab in a census I'll scream. I'ld love to see a signature somewhere on a marriage register but no, X marks the spot for most of mine up until the very late 19th century.

My one exception are my convicts; all 4 of them transported from England and Scotland to "Down Under" leaving behind a lot of detail in the criminal registers and prison archives.

I can understand completely, though I have no surnames in my family without vowels, though being from Enid, I grew up around a few. As my mother's side of the family is completely Southern I have experienced the same trials with Southern genealogy. Southern courthouses were given to spontaneous combustion of the non-Sherman variety. My Yankee are not that much better, they were in Connecticut and Long Island, at the time, part of Connecticut, founding colonies and then the line to my ancestor, who seems to have popped up out of the prairie in Illinois, dims a bit.